Strategy and efficacy
The American national-security strategy is a genre with predictable architecture. It opens with a vision of the world as it should be, names a set of threats to that vision, articulates desired end-states, and then derives ways and means by which the end-states will be reached. Each step presupposes the next: the vision precedes the threats, the end-states precede the means, the plan precedes the action. The document is, in genre terms, a teleology — a piece of writing organized by τέλος, by the end toward which everything in it is meant to point.
This is not a parochial American habit. It is a genre that descends, with adaptations, from Aristotle through Clausewitz through twentieth-century operations research. Its premise is that rational action proceeds from a representation of the desired outcome and works backward to articulable steps. To have no plan is to be irrational; to have a plan that the situation has overrun is to need a new one.
The Chinese strategic tradition that François Jullien excavates in La Propension des choses and Traité de l'efficacité runs on a different axis. Its organizing concept is not τέλος but shi (勢): the propensity inherent in any configuration of forces. A shoreline has a shi; a market has a shi; an army formation has a shi; a political moment has a shi. The strategist's first competence is to read the shi of the situation he is in. His second is to inflect it — not by imposing a foreign design, but by adding small weights at the right places so that the situation's own propensity carries the day. Sun Zi's celebrated formulations about winning without fighting, about the shape of water, about the supreme excellence of breaking the enemy's plans rather than his army, all belong to this same intellectual reflex.
It is tempting to flatten this into the cliché that Chinese strategy is "indirect" while Western strategy is "direct." That gets the surface right and the depth wrong. The relevant écart is not between two styles inside a shared category. It is between two ideas of what strategy is for. Strategy under the plan-frame is the production of a path from where we are to where we should be. Strategy under the shi-frame is the cultivation of a situation in which the desired tendency is the path of least resistance. The first requires a clear end-state and willing application; the second requires a long, attentive read of the configuration and a light hand.
The consequences for U.S.–China analysis are direct. Three are worth naming.
The forecasting error
Western analysts trained to identify decision points repeatedly forecast PRC action by asking when the decision will be made. The literature on Taiwan contingencies is full of this: a window opens around 2027, or 2030, or 2049, and Beijing must "decide." This framing imports the plan-frame into a tradition for which strategic life is rarely organized around discrete decisions. It is more accurate, and harder to operationalize for a Pentagon planning cycle, to say that a long propensity is being shaped — military modernization, economic integration of the strait, gray-zone activity, diplomatic isolation — such that at some point the situation may simply tilt without a decision being legibly taken at all. The relevant question is not "when will Xi decide" but "what configuration is being built, and at what point will inflection cost more than acquiescence." That question has no single date attached.
The credit problem
U.S. industrial policy, having converted in part to the language of strategy, now produces large planning documents (the CHIPS Act, the IRA, various national strategies for AI and biotech) and asks to be evaluated by what they accomplish on schedule. The rhetorical apparatus presupposes that successful policy is articulable as plan-then-execution, with credit assigned to the office that signed the plan. PRC industrial practice produces planning documents too, but read carefully, they often function as artifacts for foreign legibility. The actual mechanism of action is more often a long, distributed inflection of latent tendencies — capital allocation, talent pipelines, standards-body presence, supply-chain concentration — that does not produce headline-shaped credit and is therefore systematically under-counted by an event-trained press. Western analysis of "Made in China 2025" assessed it against its own stated targets and pronounced it a partial failure. The propensity it inflected was nonetheless inflected, target-attainment or no.
The temptation of mirror-imaging
The deepest risk is that under competitive pressure, U.S. strategy has begun to import the appearance of shi-thinking — the language of long-term competition, of shaping the strategic environment, of multi-decade horizons — without the underlying intellectual reflex. Plans about shi are not shi. A strategy document that announces it will think in fifty-year terms is still organized by the genre of the plan, with end-states and means and accountability cycles, and will be redrafted as soon as the next administration opens. A genuinely shi-organized practice would look different from the inside: it would tolerate ambiguity in its own articulated objectives, distribute its action across institutions in ways that survive electoral turnover, and resist the rhetorical demand to produce visible decisive moments. American institutional design, with its quadrennial reset and its premium on credit-claiming, is not built for this. The honest question is not "should the U.S. think more like China" — that is a category error — but "what would be lost by attempting to, and what could be salvaged of the strategic patience the original frame did not natively support."
What Jullien is not saying
It is worth being precise about what is and is not at stake. Jullien is not arguing that Chinese strategic thought is superior, that Western strategic thought is naïve, or that the two should be blended into a synthesis. The écart is what makes either configuration legible to the other; collapsing the gap loses both. His own method is the détour: by going through the Chinese tradition, the Western reader recovers what the plan-frame had foreclosed without naming the foreclosure. Among the things recoverable is the recognition that the plan-document is one genre of strategy among others, and that the cultural reflex of demanding a plan before authorizing action has its own costs — costs that show up as the inability to act at the ji, the incipient moment, before the situation has manifested itself loudly enough to enter the planning cycle.
For the U.S.–China relation in particular, the practical implication is modest and severe at once. The most consequential moves on either side are unlikely to look like decisions. They will look like nothing — a quiet capital reallocation, a standards meeting, an academic exchange tightened or relaxed, a port acquisition, a satellite manufacturer reorganized. The frame that recognizes only the event will register them only when they have aggregated past the point of cheap response. The frame that recognizes shi will register them as they happen. Whether the United States can develop institutional habits adequate to the second frame, while remaining a polity that runs on legibility and accountability, is the open question. It is not the question the strategy documents are asking.
Concepts touched: 勢 shi, τέλος telos, plan, 因 yin, 無為 wuwei, 機 ji.