Richard A. Bitzinger

Just the Facts, Ma'am: The Challenge of Analysing and Assessing Chinese Military Expenditures

Defence budgets can be a useful, even critical, indicator of national defence priorities, policies, strategies and capabilities. Consequently, knowing better where China is spending its defence dollars can be a useful mechanism for analysing and assessing current Chinese strategic and military intents, resolve and priorities, and whether the Chinese are devoting sufficient resources to meeting these needs. The dilemma with exploiting Chinese defence budgets as an analytic tool is that it is a highly data-dependent approach forced to work with a near-absence of usable data. Consequently, Western analysis of Chinese military expenditures has been forced to rely heavily upon extrapolation, inference, conjecture and even gut instinct in order to come up with “reasonable” guesses as how large Chinas actual defence budget might be – an approach fraught with many pitfalls. This report argues that Chinese defence budget analysis has largely reached a methodological dead-end, and while it puts forth some suggestions for improving and refining this line of research, one should accept that, given the continued paucity of reliable data, this approach is a severely limited line of enquiry.

China's Defense Technology and Industrial Base in a Regional Context: Arms Manufacturing in Asia

Abstract This paper examines defense industrialization in three leading arms-producing states in Asia – India, Japan, and South Korea – and how their experiences compare to Chinas recent defense industrial developments. It argues that despite decades of considerable effort and investments in pursuit of a techno-nationalist self-arming strategy, these countries have experienced only modest success when it comes to achieving such self-reliance. Most regional defense industrial bases lack the necessary design skills and technological expertise in order to truly innovate, and at best these countries act as ‘late innovators’ when it comes to armaments production. The experiences of these countries have lessons for China as it attempts to move into the first tier of arms-producing states. China has over the past 15 years made significant progress in modernizing its defense technological and industrial base. At the same time, China faces the same long-term challenges that currently confront other regional arms industries – that is, making techno-nationalism work at the later stages of innovation. This is particularly critical as Chinas defense industry strives to move from a basically platform-centric to an increasingly network-centric technological–industrial process.

Reforming China’s defense industry

ABSTRACT Even with sizable economic inputs, access to foreign technologies, and considerable political will, China, up until the late 1990s, experienced only limited success when it came to the local design, development, and manufacture of advanced conventional weapons. Not surprisingly, therefore, reforming the local defense industry in order to upgrade its technology base and manufacturing capabilities and to make armaments production more efficient and cost-effective has long preoccupied the Chinese leadership. The fact that most of these efforts had little positive impact on the country’s military technological and industrial capabilities only encouraged Beijing to experiment with additional reforms in the hopes of finally getting it right.

Reshaping the People’s Liberation Army since the 18th Party Congress: Politics, Policymaking, and Professionalism

ABSTRACT Following the pivotal decision by China’s last paramount leader to change the course of China’s development in the latter years of the previous century, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undergone profound changes that have enabled it transform itself more quickly than ever before. Under its current commander-in-chief, these developments have become more pronounced, with Xi Jinping taking a noticeably greater interest in harnessing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) coercive forces as his domestic powerbase and as a foreign policy instrument complementing his country’s hard economic assets. Following the 18th Party Congress, reforms to the PLA’s command and control functions have continued apace. It is thus timely to scrutinize the PLA’s continued efforts to further enhance its operational capabilities, in terms of both its hardware – including its hard power projection and procurement – and its heartware – the softer aspects of its development, such as its operational doctrine and military ethos. With the CCP keen to continue devoting substantial political and economic capital to strengthen the capabilities of its armed servants, the present period is a critical phase in the reshaping of the PLA into a force on par with the worlds other advanced militaries.

A New Direction in the People's Liberation Army's Emergent Strategic Thinking, Roles and Missions

The Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) has been undergoing a profound transformation in terms of its operational capabilities, both with regard to its hardware as well as its heartware , i.e. the softer aspects of its development including its operational culture and military ethos. These changes have permeated every facet of the PLA – technological, organizational and doctrinal. Despite successive generations of Chinese leaders having declared their adherence to “peace” and “development,” it has become clearer that Beijings security policy under Xi Jinping has shifted steadily away from “keeping a low profile.” In that regard, the status of the PLA in the domestic and international calculus of Chinas new commander-in-chief has, unsurprisingly, become more pronounced, with Xi taking noticeably greater interest in harnessing the Chinese Communist Partys coercive forces as his personal domestic powerbase and foreign policy instrument complementing Chinas hard economic power.