The success of Chinese foreign policy since 1949 can be demonstrated empirically in terms of core national interests defined by the realist international relations perspective: state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and socioeconomic development. Influential realist writers, however, fail to consistently identify or explain the success of Chinese foreign policy, despite the work of area specialists who suggest that Chinese foreign policy displays consistent and effective, strategic patterns of force. Strategic thought arises from culturally differing ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions, as modified within specific historical conditions. Using the theoretical approach of comparative strategic culture, an abstract conceptual framework is developed for philosophical analysis of western and Chinese strategic culture. Classical and contemporary western realist-strategic paradigms coexist in theoretical and practical tension, resulting in a western strategic ethnocentrism which explains realist failure to recognize Chinese strategic patterns in foreign policy. Chinese philosophical assumptions, reinforced in linguistic structure, create a culturally paradigmatic approach to strategic thought, modified by the modern historical context of civil/national wars and state-building. The modern Chinese strategic paradigm of protracted war is characterized by the mutually constitutive relationship between the military and political dimensions of force, and by a cumulative, discontinuous pattern of foreign policy and state-building, in which force is created, stored, and applied over space and time. / Graduate