China's Search for a Modern Air Force

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For more than fortyeight years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has sought to build a combat-ready air force.1 First in the Korean War (1950–53) and then again in 1979, Beijing’s leaders gave precedence to this quest, but it was the Gulf War in 1991 coupled with growing concern over Taiwan that most alerted them to the global revolution in air warfare and prompted an accelerated buildup. This study brieoy reviews the history of China’s recurrent efforts to create a modern air force and addresses two principal questions. Why did those efforts, which repeatedly enjoyed a high priority, fail? What have the Chinese learned from these failures and how do they deane and justify their current air force programs? The answers to the arst question highlight changing defense concerns in China’s national planning. Those to the second provide a more nuanced understanding of current security goals, interservice relations, and the evolution of national defense strategies. With respect to the arst question, newly available Chinese military writings and interviews with People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ofacers on the history of the air force suggest that the reasons for the recurrent failure varied markedly from period to period. That variation itself has prevented the military and political leaderships from forming a consensus about the lessons of the past and the policies that could work. In seeking to answer the second question, the article examines emerging air force and national defense policies and doctrines and sets forth Beijing’s rationale for the air force programs in light of new security challenges, particularly those in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. In the 1990s, the air force has fashioned both a more realistic R&D (research and development) and procurement policy and a more comprehensive strategy for the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) in future warfare. We conclude that this strategy is recasting time-