Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. vi, 295 pp. (Figures, tables.) $24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4214-1158-3.
As a result of China’s reform movement since the 1980s, the People’s Liberation Army (the PLA, as China’s army, air, naval, and strategic missile forces are collectively known) has experienced a wave of growth and change in the past thirty years. The ongoing changes and the inevitable implications in Asia-Pacific security have attracted great academic attention in the West, especially in the United States. As a leading scholar in the field, Tai Ming Cheung has brought together a group of first-string experts and their students in a new effort to provide a better understanding of the progress and problems of PLA modernization and what it means to the United States. The underlying research in the book reflects more than three years of continuous collaborative efforts under Cheung’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California. His collection of nine essays offers a comprehensive and insightful assessment of the Chinese defense science and technology (S&T) in the 2010s. Any China specialist, military analyst, strategist, Chinese historian, teacher, and student of international relations in East Asia will find the volume’s previously unpublished sources of great interest and will value the important, novel questions it raises. This collection deserves close reading, particularly in view of the tension that still goes on in the South China Sea between the PLA and the US armed forces.
The nine essays cover three major issues of Chinese defense science and technology capabilities. Chapters 1, 2, and 6 develop some frameworks of analysis to Chinese defense innovation, including “a rigorous definition” (3) of defense innovation, a “framework for understanding Chinese defense and military innovation” (23), and an approach to Beijing’s “dual-use, defense-oriented innovation ecosystem” (139). Chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9 apply the conception and frameworks to an analysis of the Chinese navy, air force, missile industry, and aerospace programs as case studies. These chapters also examine the defense-innovation-related organizations, administration, operation, and civil-military relations by studying, for example, the PLA’s Science and Technology Committee (STC) and military representative offices (MROs). Chapters 5 and 7 explore the status of the PLA modernization in Chinese politics and international defense industrial relations. The former points out that China “has crafted a strategy that is focused on greatly expanding its utilization of civil-military integration (CMI)” (109) by examining Hu Jintao’s government in the 2000s. The latter places China in the “lower parts of the Tier 2 category” as one of the “adapters and modifiers” in the global defense industry because the Chinese defense industry “demonstrates few capacities for designing and producing relatively advanced conventional weapon systems” (5) and “China appears still to have only limited indigenous technological capabilities, relative to the West” (203). Nevertheless, Cheung concludes that China’s “enormous scale and intensity of this technological and industrial undertaking has not been seen since the Cold War days of intense US-Soviet technological and military rivalry” (273). He warns that it will undermine regional security, since the Asia-Pacific countries, including the United States, “have been taking steps to beef up their regional defense capabilities through weapons acquisitions or adjusting their military strategies and force deployments” (277).
The contributors have done incredible research on such a comprehensive subject in a single volume. Their multi-lingual capabilities and multiple-perspective approach have distinguished this book from most previous works. Therefore, this book makes three significant contributions to the scholarship in the field. First, the book compares the defense industry of China with those of other countries, including the United States, Britain, Russia, Italy, India, and Turkey. Its comparative perspective identifies China’s rapidly increased defense budget (at least fivefold over the past fifteen years) with the world’s second-highest defense R&D budget, and locates its innovation sources both domestically and internationally. Second, its diachronic discussions explore the reasons and factors for the PLA’s changes and constraints on the implementation of reforms, as well as the outcome of those efforts. Through their detailed narrative, the chapters capture the essence of successive generations of the PLA while illuminating the themes and patterns of its modernization. Third, the innovation patterns and models studied in the volume, such as China’s high-cost, high-end “gold-plated” approach, provide some predictive power to see the future of the PLA S&T. The Chinese defense industry will develop sophisticated weapons in some areas “that are able to match those of the United States and other advanced rivals” (277).
However, like most other essay collections, its chapters could have been better connected to each other in terms of narratives and analysis. Its introduction seems more a commentary or a conclusive summation of the essays than an entryway. Also, the book needs to be consistent in format and style. For instance, a few chapters use the Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin both in the text and endnotes, some only use the Chinese characters in the endnotes, and others don’t use them at all. The name of a well-known Chinese science and technology university in Beijing has traditional Wade-Giles spelling as “Tsinghua University” (China’s MIT) on pages 13 and 149, but in Hanyu Pinyin as “Qinghua University” on pages 115 and 247. A list of abbreviations and maps of China may be necessary for those who are not familiar with the military phrases and Chinese provinces and cities. A glossary and a note on transliteration would also help in navigating Chinese names and places that are largely alien to Western readers.
Xiaobing Li
University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, USA
pp. 637-639