China's Military Industrial Complex: Its Approach to the Acquisition of Modern Military Technology

Abstract

China has begun a new attempt at military modernization. The latest movement to strengthen the Chinese military, articulated by Zhou Enlai in the early 1970s as a key element of the Four Modernizations, took a new impetus after the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict. This was the first major battle the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had participated in since the conflict with India in 1962, and it convinced China's leadership that more than ideology was needed to defend China's interests. Although China's incursion into Vietnam achieved the political goal of diverting Vietnam's attention from Kampuchea to the Sino-Vietnamese border, it also demonstrated the many weaknesses that had evolved from ignoring the needs of the military during the Cultural Revolution. As a result Deng Xioaping, addressing the PLA in September 1981, called the Chinese military to build a powerful, modern, and regularized revolutionary armed force and, on the basis of our steadily expanding economy, [to] improve the army's weapons and equipment and speed up the modernization of our national defense.' Significantly, Deng used the term modernization to mean the upgrading of weapons and equipment. This narrow Chinese usage of the term military modernization will be used in this article; it does not encompass other movements such as reform and regularization of the military.