Abstract
This article attempts to study the patterns of China’s military capacity during the cold war era. We believe that this work will not only benefit us in better understanding what factors have contributed to China’s military expenditures over the past 30 years, but also be beneficial in the prediction of China’s future military establishment. The theory directing our work is Lewis F. Richardson’s action-reaction theory which describes military capacity build-up as a process in which changes in a nation’s defense expenditures are a function of its opponent’s defense expenditures and the hostility and the economic burden of producing and maintaining arms. Guided by this action-reaction model, we test whether or not China’s military expenditures are a function of its neighboring rival countries/regions for the period of 1963 to 1990. Sixteen different formulations of Richardson’s model are employed. We use the OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) linear regression technique to test our model. Our findings suggest that possibly in the case of Taiwan and Japan does an action-reaction process occur. In addition, models that employ time lags better illustrate whether an action-reaction process is going on.
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