Chinese Rare Earth Exports and US Military Industry: Do Governance Mechanisms De-escalate Strategic Rivalry?

Among scholars of East Asia, the role of US military offshore procurement (OSP) and the military–industrial complex (MIC) has been underplayed in explanations of rapid industrial transformation. Yet the foundations of industrialization in places such as South Korea, when analyzed in strongly ‘national–territorial’ and state-centric terms of the predominant, so-called ‘neo-Weberian’ accounts, remain inadequately illuminated. We argue that a geopolitical economy approach focusing on the roles of OSP and relations within the US MIC brings to light crucial sociospatial dimensions of the Korean developmental state's industrial success during the Vietnam War era, dimensions that are largely absent from the neo-Weberian accounts. We examine, in particular, the Park Chung Hee regime's participation in the Vietnam War, and the attendant development of Korean industrial chaebol such as Hyundai, arguing that the successes of the south Korean developmental state and chaebol were enabled by their enrolment in the US MIC, via OSP.

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

ABSTRACTThis article examines the close historical and contemporary ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood from the 1920s until today. Drawing on the US military as an in-depth case study, the article shows the extent to which key military actors view the conduct of war as an arena that stretches well beyond the actual battlefields and includes the production of war movies, film documentaries, computer simulations and first person shooter video games. The article begins with an examination of the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ and its evolution into what experts have dubbed ‘The Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-Net).’ It then focuses on the military’s relationship with the filming industry, with the production of reality TV, and the commercial gaming industry. It thereby investigates, through in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, how this phenomenon has evolved over time and into new areas where games, simulators, and game technologies cross the boundaries between militaries, the defense industry, Hollywood and the commercial gaming sector. And it shows how the advent of digital new technologies have opened new platforms through which militaries seek to boost recruitment, to (re)write military history, and to influence the portrayal of the armed forces in the eyes of the public.

Since 2016, China has been conducting military flybys around Taiwan, while the US has approved arms sales to Taiwan on several occasions and sent warplanes and battleships through the Taiwan Strait. How does Taiwanese public opinion respond to the Chinese and US military presence in the Strait? Is the public likely to become less supportive of de jure independence for Taiwan on account of China's military deterrence or more supportive owing to a perceived likelihood of US military assistance? In this report, we provide answers to these questions based on evidence from a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan in October–November 2020. We find that Taiwanese are less sensitive to the Chinese military presence in the Taiwan Strait but have become more supportive of de jure independence after seeing the US aircraft in the area. Our findings contribute to studies of cross-Strait relations and US foreign policy on the Taiwan Strait.

Exhibition Review: <i>Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970</i>

This article examines the economic, political and institutional power of the military-industrial complex (MIC) by examining its influence on military spending before and after the events of 9/11. The reasons for the continuity of MIC influence in US foreign policy is explored. This includes the role of military contractors in financing policy planning organizations, the relationship between military contractors and the Defense Department, and the centralization of executive branch authority in foreign policy decision-making, especially during critical junctures or foreign policy crises.

Over the past decade, China has made significant progress in the development of the defense industry; today, China is able to produce almost all the nomenclature items of weapons, military vehicles, and ammunition. The aim of the research is to analyze China’s successes in the development of the defense sector; it is highlighted that the Chinese military-industrial complex has reached the point of technological self-sufficiency at this time. The essential features of the public-private partnership model (“the triple helix”) are considered. The authors tracked the evolution of China’s export regulations as they related to the selling of goods from the militaryindustrial complex. The share of Chinese military-industrial complex exports in the global arms market is revealed. The study shows the escalation of US-Chinese rivalry in the field of building up military capacities and establishing export ties. Trade in military-industrial complex products is a means for China to achieve its foreign policy goals. The authors discuss possible areas for improving the country’s export strategies and vectors of geographical coverage of foreign trade, as well as barriers and difficulties in the development of foreign trade in military-industrial complex products.

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.

The United States supports military operations in Ukraine and confronts with China, pressure allies to raise military spending to 2% of GDP, and at the same time announces a medium-term reduction of military spending in real terms. So, the US is trying to curb the huge budget deficit and public debt, "sell" more security and weapons to its allies, and avoid the degradation of its military producers. American options for reducing military spending have little budget effect, the allies can’t significantly increase military spending and purchase of American weapons due to large public debt and the interests of their military industry. America's cut-and-shift military finance will realize only under ideal conditions, although with the juggling of facts and figures they seem realistic.

Development with deep civil-military Integration is the common choice of many countries around the world currently. In order to explore the path of development with deep civil-military Integration of Chinese military industry enterprises, this paper analyzes characteristics of current operation mode of military industry enterprises and issues existed in operation mode of military industry enterprises under the situation of deep civil-military Integration development from the perspective of operation mode. And this paper also comes up with the idea of innovating operation modes of enterprises from the aspects of financing, technology, marketing and talents team building, etc. expecting to bring about inspiration to practice to adapt to the trend of deep civil-military integration development. Index Terms - Civil-Military Integration, Operation Mode, Military Industry Enterprise

Chinese rare earth export policies currently result in accelerating its depletion. Thus adopting an optimal export trade selection strategy is crucial to determining and ultimately identifying the ideal trading partners. This paper introduces a multi-attribute decision-making methodology which is then used to select the optimal trading partner. In the method, an evaluation criteria system is established to assess the seven top trading partners based on three dimensions: political relationships, economic benefits and industrial security. Specifically, a simple additive weighing model derived from an additive utility function is utilized to calculate, rank and select alternatives. Results show that Japan would be the optimal trading partner for Chinese rare earths. The criteria evaluation method of trading partners for China's rare earth exports provides the Chinese government with a tool to enhance rare earth industrial policies.

Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence of the Pentagon in these specific disciplines have been traced in research that appeared during the final phases of the Cold War. But this research has not been updated to reflect circumstances now most definitive of the post–Cold War world: the rapid development of Internet infrastructures and applications, and the aggressive expansion of US military spending and activity. Tracing the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design, this paper considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university. It will conclude by stressing that the end of the Cold War, along with more recent developments concerning the US military, presents a juncture offering both opportunity and challenge to the evolving field of educational technology or “e-learning.”

In the early 20th century, Georges Clemenceau remarked that war was much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. In the early 21st century, it is much too profitable. This turn of history is brought into sharp relief by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where US -led military operations are the first in history to be dependent upon private military contractors. In these conflicts, private military firms deliver a wide profile of services ranging from the relatively banal to armed security, tasks previously and nearly exclusively carried out by state militaries. Many in the popular media have seized upon the term mercenary to describe the for-profit activities of private military firms, but the designation is a misnomer. Today, private military firms are integrated into the operations of the world's most powerful militaries and normalized through their transactions on the free market. The market for private military services is considerable and the degree to which the US military has been privatized is so extensive that the viability of US foreign engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan is contingent upon the availability of contracted labour. But it is not for lack of technical capability or uniformed personnel. Rather, private sources of military labour permit US leaders to sell a politically viable war policy to domestic audiences by maintaining low levels of uniformed troop levels.Military privatization in the first decade of the 21st century has elicited pressing new questions and a growing body of academic literature has emerged to address its historical, conceptual, institutional, ideational, and social dimensions.1 Making sense of a booming industry is a challenge and the pace of private military expansion has outpaced scholarly inquiry, leaving a number of issues unexplored. One such area is the relationship between military privatization and broader ideational patterns informing public policy, specifically, economic neoliberalism. This article aims to correct this deficit by exploring the transformative interactions of US military policy and economic neoliberalism. Indeed, inquiries into private military firms in the 1990s address the privatization question, but privatization and neoliberalism are not interchangeable concepts. Privatization is a single institutional strategy in a broader syndrome of policies that constitute economic neoliberalism. This is an important distinction that has gone unnoticed in much of the literature on military privatization and the rise of the private military industry.In the United States, the effects of military neoliberalism run deep, as the figures below will attest. However, the US did not arrive at this state overnight. Military neoliberalism (or neoliberalization, as will be seen) has been an uneven and improvised process, reflecting the real-world limitations of applied neoliberalism and the evolution of the neoliberal ideational framework itself. As will be discussed, the privatization and reregulation of military contracting did not occur in neat and ordered sequences. Different approaches to privatization coexist in uneven and contradictory ways across the US private military industry. More broadly though, military neoliberalism cuts to the core of the Westphalian state itself, revealing fundamental transformations to the indispensable unit of analysis in the academic field of international relations. By situating evolving US military privatization practices within evolving ideational processes, this article aims to explain the relationship between US military policy and neoliberal economic ideology.The article begins with an overview of the scale and cost of contracting in the two major theatres of the war on terrorism, followed by a brief discussion about the limitations of problem-solving approaches to scholarship on the private military industry. This leads to a discussion about theories from the critical international political economy literature that better explain the transformations wrought by military privatization, specifically the theories of the competition state and especially rollback and rollout neoliberalism. …

This paper investigates public attitudes toward types of war casualties. Through a survey experiment, we examine Taiwanese responses to hypothetical scenarios involving casualties among Taiwan's own military, the US military as allies, the Chinese military as enemy combatants, and mainland Chinese civilians. Our paper reveals three findings: first, there is a stronger aversion among Taiwanese citizens to their own military casualties compared with those of their allies. Second, Taiwanese attitudes toward their own military casualties are more adverse than those incurred by enemy military. Lastly, Taiwanese support for military action diminishes more significantly with Chinese civilian casualties than with Taiwanese military losses.

Secondary brain injury is the main cause of mortality from traumatic brain injury (TBI). One hallmark of TBI is intracranial hemorrhage, which occurs in 40-50% of severe TBI cases. Early identification of intracranial hematomas in TBI patients allows early surgical evacuation and can reduce the case fatality rate of TBI. As pre-hospital care is the weakest part of Chinese emergency care, there is an urgent need for a capability to detect brain hematomas early. In China, in addition to preventing injuries and diseases in military staff and in enhancing the military armed forces during war, military medicine participates in actions such as emergency public health crises, natural disasters, emerging conflicts, and anti-terrorist campaigns during peacetime. The purpose of this observational study is to evaluate in the Chinese military general hospital the performance of a near-infrared (NIR)-based portable device, developed for US Military, in the detection of traumatic intracranial hematomas. The endpoint of the study was a description of the test characteristics (sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values [NPV]) of the portable NIR-based device in identification of hematomas within its detection limits (volume >3.5 mL and depth <2.5 cm) compared with computed tomography (CT) scans as the gold standard. The Infrascanner Model 2000 NIR device (InfraScan, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, USA) was used for hematoma detection in patients sustaining TBI. Data were collected in the People's Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing using the NIR device at the time of CT scans, which were performed to evaluate suspected TBI. One hundred and twenty seven patients were screened, and 102 patients were included in the per protocol population. Of the 102 patients, 24 were determined by CT scan to have intracranial hemorrhage. The CT scans were read by an independent neuroradiologist who was blinded to the NIR measurements. The NIR device demonstrated sensitivity of 100% (95% confidence intervals [CI] 82.8-100%) and specificity of 93.6% (95%CI 85-97.6%) in detecting intracranial hematomas larger than 3.5 mL in volume and that were less than 2.5 cm from the surface of the brain. Blood contained within scalp hematomas was found to be a major cause of false-positive results with this technology. The study showed that the Infrascanner is a suitable portable device in Chinese population for detecting preoperative intracranial hematomas in remote locations, emergency rooms, and intensive care units. It could aid military medics, physicians, and hospital staff, permitting better triage decisions, earlier treatment, and reducing secondary brain injury caused by acute and delayed hematomas.