The State is defined by law and by war: it is the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence, within and without, that marks it as a State. —Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles    Just under three years ago, in the third chapter of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, I argued that too much strategic planning with regard to China appeared to be based on simple linear extrapolations of macro-economic growth trends. We need, I wrote, to engage instead in some reasonably sophisticated scenario planning, if we are not to find ourselves caught out by strategic surprises in the…